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Red Tom" Hickey - The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,273
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Red Tom" Hickey - The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism (Hardcover)
Series: Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This is the fascinating biography of a bright young working man,
Tom Hickey, who came to the United States from Ireland in 1892,
became a machinist, and soon joined the Knights of Labor and the
Socialist Labor Party. His party boss recognized the potential in
this Irishman and even made him an "enforcer" against those who
questioned the boss's authority. The enforcer, though, eventually
found himself forced out and moved west to start a new life.
Ultimately, Hickey landed in Texas and saw an opportunity to use
syndicalism as an organizing tool to build a state socialist party.
He did just that. Within a few years, Hickey transformed the
faction-ridden Socialist Party of America in Texas into a force
strong enough to threaten the Republican Party at the ballot box.
He gained a large following thanks to a unique mixture of
evangelical rhetoric and militant industrial unionism. As
biographer Peter H. Buckingham points out, Hickey failed to deliver
his people into the Promised Land. Violence, poll taxes, voter
suppression, and other forces made voting for socialist candidates
problematic, and the Democratic Party soon co-opted the more
appealing elements of socialism into watered-down, reformist planks
for the Texan voter. By the time Hickey died of throat cancer in
the mid-1920s, his moment had passed. "Red Tom" Hickey is an
important contribution to Texas and American history, capturing a
moment in time that Buckingham argues was the second sustained
crisis in American history: a democratic society wrestling with the
effects of industrial capitalism.
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